Front-rimming a revenue target is never a good thing, but it's all the worse if you simultaneously overshoot your expense budget.

That’s the scenario taking form at Williams College out in Western Massachusetts as it wraps up its current fiscal year, although you wouldn’t know it from the quiet confidence pervading the school’s administrative offices.

According to the college’s finance chief, the prestigious liberal arts school will have fallen short of its revenue goals by a “modest amount” when it closes the books on fiscal 2014 later this month. Meanwhile, expenses are expected to exceed predictions when all is said and done, meaning the school’s operations are unlikely to rebound to the black any time soon. Williams posted cumulative operating losses of around $28 million during its two preceding fiscal years.

Williams has done none of the above, largely because it hasn’t had to.

Blessed with one of the largest endowments in the country, the college is in rarefied air relative to its higher-ed peers. As of last year, Williams’ endowment assets were valued at $1.9 billion, a number that no doubt has grown in the interim amid a resurgent stock market. The college’s endowment ranked as the nation’s 36th-largest among U.S. colleges and universities as of fiscal 2013. Williams’ investment reserves compare even more favorably when accounting for its modest enrollment of about 2,100 students.

Indeed, Williams is a poster child for the promises that might come to small, private schools eager to build endowments and lessen their reliance on tuition revenue. Semester-long courses with two-to-three students are common, as are on-campus research and internship opportunities. The college's student-to-faculty ratio was an impressive 6.4 as of fiscal 2013, roughly half the 11.6 average posted among U.S. liberal arts colleges, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Likewise, Williams' 450-acre campus in Williamstown is in strong condition, thanks to a steady facilities and maintenance budget of about $13 million per year, or 7 percent of its annual spending. Plans to borrow and further update its campus and facilities are on the horizon.

Fred Puddester, Williams’ chief financial officer, said the school’s operating philosophy essentially boils down to a simple formula, a so-called “30-60-90” ratio made possible by the college’s considerable endowment. The “30” refers to the $30,000 average that Williams’ students pay to attend. The “60” is the roughly $60,000 sticker price that Williams advertises to prospective students.

And the “90?” That’s what Puddester said the college spends on average per attending student. “When we think about this, we really care less about the 60 and try to focus on the 90 and 30,” he said.

Williams draws on its endowment annually to plug the financial gap between what it charges per student and what it actually spends per student. Last year the college used around $80 million in endowment funds to support its operations, slightly more than the $66.1 million it generated in net tuition revenue.

Nonetheless, signs of higher-ed's deep-rooted problems are still apparent at Williams, despite the college's relative strength. For example, applications for the 2013 fall semester hit a three-year low of 6,854 and were off some 10 percent since before the credit-market crash of 2008. While matriculations have held steady at around 540 students each year, the collective academic profiles of Williams’ incoming freshman classes have become less transparent to the public. Last year, 28 percent of its incoming freshman said they were ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes, versus 43 percent in 2008.

The change appears to stem from the amount of information disclosed by Williams' incoming freshman. Approximately 68 percent of the college's incoming class did not disclose a high school rank last fall, versus 50 percent who did in 2008.

A Williams spokesman said the college's academic rigor and standards have remained consistent, and that around 88 percent of its incoming freshman who disclose their class rank in high school in fact hail from the top decile of their graduating classes.

Regardless, a greater share of its students — more than half last year — hailed from foreign countries and U.S. states beyond Williams’ traditional recruiting territories of New England and the Mid Atlantic. In 2008, that ratio was around 46 percent.

Puddester said the college has no plans to radically shake up its recruiting or curriculum offerings and is more or less comfortable with its current course. He said the college's stability stems from decades of planning, dating back to when Williams and most other private colleges were on relatively equal footing in terms of resources and endowment assets.

He said things changed in the 1970s, when some schools, such as Williams, opted to hold enrollment steady and pursue other revenue sources such as endowment giving, while others sought to grow through enrollment, largely with costly new classroom facilities and dormitories. “If you look at the data, we were all bunched together.”

Today Williams is in the early stages of preparing a $50 million bond sale as part of a broader plan to build a new state-of-the-art science center on campus. The new building will replace the school’s existing science facilities and is not intended to boost its student population in any meaningful capacity, Puddester said. He said the new science center is part of an ongoing effort to tweak Williams’ curriculum to "best reflect the country’s needs."